7/19/15 D.
Marion Clark
Introduction
A few weeks ago Jewel Morrison sang for the prelude the song
that we know as “Dem Bones.” I was struck by the rendition of it, which
presents more than a funny children’s song, but gets the message across about
the power of God’s word. And so I told her I was inspired enough to preach on
the text, which I will do in two weeks. The message this morning treats the
passage that precedes the Valley of Dry Bones passage in Ezekiel 37.
Text
This passage is famous in its own right, especially verses
25-27. Here is the context. Jerusalem has fallen to Nebuchadnezzar, king of
Babylon. The nation of Judah has ended. The northern kingdom of Israel had been
broken up over a century earlier and the inhabitants deported throughout the
Assyrian empire of that time. A decade earlier, Judah had succumbed to Nebuchadnezzar
who had then taken many of the people, especially the nobles, to Babylon.
Daniel and the prophet Ezekiel were in that number. He had kept the Judean king
on the throne, but that king, Zedekiah, revolted, bringing final destruction
upon Jerusalem and Judah.
Ezekiel had prophesied that this destruction would take
place and had explained why. It was for the same reason that all of the other
prophets had said, namely, for Judah’s rebellious sins. Even so, destruction is
not the last word for God’s people. Let’s listen in.
24 I will take you from the
nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land.
This is the good news of redemption
– of being brought out of exile and restored to their homeland. God has not
forgotten the people of Israel. (And from now on, they will no longer be known
as Israel, the northern kingdom and Judah, the southern kingdom. They are the
one covenant people of Israel.)
But deliverance from exile is not the
heart of Ezekiel’s message. The good news is not merely that God’s people will
move back home but that a transformation will take place within them.
25 I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all
your idols I will cleanse you.
26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new
spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your
flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And
I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be
careful to obey my rules. 28 You shall
dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and
I will be your God. 29 And I will
deliver you from all your uncleannesses.
In these five and
a half verses “I will” occurs eight times, speaking of what God will do.
New Start
The first thing
God will do is give the people a new start.
1) 25 I will sprinkle clean
water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all
your idols I will cleanse you….29 And I will deliver you from
all your uncleannesses.
The Jews are in
exile, not because a stronger military defeated their military force, but
because of their sins, which received the judgment of God. Just before the
destruction of Jerusalem, God has Ezekiel give this message to the people:
On
account of your unclean lewdness, because I would have cleansed you and you
were not cleansed from your uncleanness, you shall not be cleansed anymore till
I have satisfied my fury upon you. 14 I am the Lord. I have spoken; it shall come to pass; I will do it. I will not go
back; I will not spare; I will not relent; according to your ways and your
deeds you will be judged, declares the Lord God” (24:13-14).
God punished the
people for their uncleanness, but now he is giving them a new start by
cleansing them. He will sprinkle clean water. This image is found in Numbers
19:17ff. To cleanse a person who has become unclean, a clean person dips a
hyssop branch into a bowl of water mixed with the ashes from a sin offering and
then sprinkles the unclean person with that water. (With apologies to my
immersion brothers and sisters, the Old Testament image of cleansing with water
is that of sprinkling.) That is why Peter refers in the opening verses of his
letter to those who have been sprinkled with the blood of Christ (cf. 1 Peter
1:1-2).
And so, the
problem of us all before God is not that we have somehow grown apart from him,
have somehow become distant from him; it is that we are unclean before a holy
God, and to be brought near we must be cleansed of our sins. We need God to
sprinkle us with the water that is mixed with the sacrifice of our Lamb.
New Heart
2) 26 And I will give you a new
heart… And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a
heart of flesh.
God will cleanse
his people, giving them a new start. God will give them a new heart. God had
earlier spoken to Ezekiel about this.
And
I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will
remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, 20 that
they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be
my people, and I will be their God (11:19-20).
The heart problem
of the people of Israel is that they are stubborn. As God puts it in 3:7, “all the house of Israel have a hard forehead
and a stubborn heart.” What
can they do about it? Actually, nothing. They need a heart transplant that only
God can perform. He will take out the heart of stone and replace it with a
heart of flesh – a heart that is malleable to his teaching.
Likewise, we all must be given new
hearts. The heart of the old nature is made of stone; it cannot respond to the
gospel nor can it be molded to be a pure heart that is true to the Lord.
New Spirit
God will give a
new start by cleansing his people. He will give them a new heart that is
responsive to him. He will give a new spirit.
3) 26 and a new spirit I will put
within you….27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause
you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Heart and spirit
are close in meaning. Heart is the seat of the intellect, will, and emotions.
The spirit is the “impulse which drives the man and regulates his desires, his
thoughts and his conduct.”[i] We naturally have a stubborn stone heart with the impulse to sin –
to disobey and transgress God’s law. The Lord God will put a new spirit in us
by putting his Spirit within us, thus giving us a desire to follow God’s
commandments.
And that is what
happens in salvation. In our natural state, we will not obey because we cannot
do what God commanded the house of Israel to do in Ezekiel 18:31: “Cast away from you all the transgressions
that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit!”
God received from Israel what he receives from modern sinners – blank stares.
We are hearing without perceiving.
Some of us might
think we are responding. We become religious. We do good works. We dress up our
hearts to look pretty, and we feel nice feelings in our spirits. But we give
ourselves away by failing to receive and to understand the gospel that teaches
how utterly sinful we really are, how our hope rests solely in the work of our
Lord’s good work on the cross, and how through such an understanding the Holy
Spirit can produce in us the works that are pleasing to him.
As Jesus said, we
must be born again in order to enter into the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit
must first do the regenerating in our hearts in order to possess and to
exercise faith. It is then that the Spirit causes us to walk in the statutes of
the Lord.
New Relationship
God will give a
new start by cleansing his people. He will give a new heart that is responsive
to him. He will give a new spirit through his own Spirit that will cause them
to walk in his ways. And he will give a new relationship.
4) 28 You shall dwell in the
land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be
your God.
It is more
accurate to say that the Lord will renew his covenant relationship with his
people. They had broken their covenant vows. At Mt. Sinai, after the giving of
the commandments, they made the following covenant vow: “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we
will be obedient” (Exodus 24:7).
Suffice it to say
that they were not obedient, and so God divorced them. To impress this point,
he instructed Hosea to give his son a tough name to bear: “And the Lord said, ‘Call
his name Not My People, for you
are not my people, and I am not
your God’” (Hosea 1:9). Even so, in the very next verse God goes on to say:
Yet
the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which
cannot be measured or numbered. And in the place where it was said to them,
“You are not my people,” it shall be said to them, “Children of the living
God.”
Ezekiel is
speaking of this same covenant renewal. But it is also the extension of the
covenant relationship to peoples outside of Israel. The numbers will be like
the sand of the sea because people of all nations will be gathered into the
covenant. And so the Apostle Paul could tell the Gentile Christians:
…at
one time you were…alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to
the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now
in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood
of Christ…So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow
citizens with the saints and members of the household of God (Ephesians 2:12-13, 19).
We now are the
people of the Lord, and the Lord is our God.
A new start, a new
heart, a new spirit, a new relationship – these are great works that the Lord
promised the house of Israel. The remaining verses – 29b-38 – present the
results of the Lord God’s work in and for his people.
Prosperity
1) And I will summon the grain and make it
abundant and lay no famine upon you. 30 I will make the fruit of the tree
and the increase of the field abundant, that you may never again suffer the
disgrace of famine among the nations….33 “Thus
says the Lord God: On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will
cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places shall be rebuilt.
34 And the land that was desolate shall be
tilled, instead of being the desolation that it was in the sight of all who
passed by. 35 And they will say, ‘This
land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden, and the waste and
desolate and ruined cities are now fortified and inhabited.’
Verse 33 connects
becoming clean with prosperity. “On the
day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities” is when conditions will
change for the good. This looks back to the promises made at the onset of God’s
covenant with his people:
And
if you faithfully obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do
all his commandments that I command you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. 2 And all
these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of
the Lord your God (Deuteronomy 28:1-2).
Is this passage,
then, teaching the prosperity gospel? Well, does the prosperity gospel teach
repentance? Does it take the time to list our sins, what makes us unclean, the
idols that we have replaced God with? Does the prosperity gospel teach first of
all the holiness of God and that what matters most is the glorifying of God’s
name? For all of these things compose the message of Ezekiel.
Ezekiel here is
speaking of material prosperity, but even that prosperity is about more than
just physical prosperity. The primary blessing is the return of the house of
Israel to their home – their spiritual home. The land of Israel with Jerusalem
in particular represents living in the kingdom of God in his presence. This is
not a message of prospering in exile but of being brought home – brought home
to their God.
This is a passage
that to a degree was fulfilled in the literal return of the Jews to their
homeland seventy years after being exiled. Over time there was some prosperity
but never to the degree promised in this and other Old Testament visions. Even
now Jews look to its greater fulfillment.
We, who believe in
the Messiah and that he has come, we see even now its being fulfilled. For we
now prosper in Jesus Christ. We possess the riches that are in him. Shall I
name them? Forgiveness of our sins; being cleansed, being given a new start, a
new heart, a new spirit, a new relationship with God. Sounds familiar? Let’s
continue. We have been given good works to do, the fruit of the Holy Spirit,
the seal of the Holy Spirit assuring that we will receive our inheritance. The
list can continue, but these make clear that we are prosperous indeed.
Increase in People
The people will be prosperous and fruitful.
Their numbers will multiply.
37 “Thus says the Lord God: This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to
increase their people like a flock. 38 Like the flock for sacrifices,
like the flock at Jerusalem during her appointed feasts, so shall the waste
cities be filled with flocks of people.
God had promised that the numbers
of his people would be like the sands of the sea. Israel did eventually grow
again, but it is in the spread of the gospel where this prophecy is truly fulfilled.
For untold millions over the ages have been born into the kingdom of God so
that the vision in Revelation 7:9 reports: “After
this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from
every nation, from all tribes and peoples
and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
Humility of the People
There will be prosperity; there
will great numbers of people. Such fortunes typically lead a people to be
proud, but these people will be humble.
31 Then you will remember your
evil ways, and your deeds that were not good, and you will loathe yourselves
for your iniquities and your abominations. 32 It is not for your sake that I
will act, declares the Lord God; let that be
known to you. Be ashamed and confounded for your ways, O house of Israel.
The unmerited
blessings of God will lead them to repentance. God makes an enlightening
statement about his own motivation in verse 32: “It is not for your sake that I will act.” For whose sake will he
act? For his own. Here are the verses prior to our passage:
“Therefore
say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act,
but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to
which you came. 23 And I will vindicate the holiness of my great
name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned
among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when
through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes (vs 22-23).
It is a humbling
thought, isn’t it? The great work of salvation is accomplished, not because God
felt indebted to us, not because he thought us worthy, but out of concern for
his own glory.
Glory of God
And so we come to the last three
verses, which express this concern for his glory.
36 Then the nations that are
left all around you shall know that I am the Lord; I have rebuilt the ruined
places and replanted that which was desolate. I am the Lord; I have spoken, and I will do it.
37 “Thus says the Lord God: This also I will let the house of Israel ask me to do for them: to
increase their people like a flock. 38 Like the flock for sacrifices,
like the flock at Jerusalem during her appointed feasts, so shall the waste
cities be filled with flocks of people. Then they will know that I am the Lord.”
That phrase, “know that I am the Lord,” expresses the theme
of Ezekiel. “I am the Lord” occurs no less than eighty-two times in the book.
God wants to be known. He wants to be glorified. This is God’s chief aim in our
creation and certainly in our salvation. Our catechism gets it right: “What is
the chief of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”
Conclusion
Let’s recap. Using God’s promises to the house of Israel for
our model, we learn that God has promised us – those who call on Jesus’ name –
a new start. He will cleanse us from our uncleanness. He will give us a new
heart, whereby we can now be responsive to him. He will give us a new spirit
whereby we will desire to be obedient to him. And he will give us a new
relationship with him in which he is our God and we are his people.
In that new relationship we will be prosperous as we possess
the riches that are in Christ. We will multiply in number as people from all
people groups are brought into Christ’s kingdom. We will not take pride in our
new relationship and prosperity, but rather all the more will be humble as we
accept that we are saved not for anything good found in us, nor that God needs
us, but for the sake of his own glory which God prizes above all else.
To his glory, for his name’s sake will we worship him, live
for him, and take joy in him.
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